Tom Horan on Gil Scott-Heron, a jazz poet who reshaped American music.

‘Well the first thing I want to say is, ‘Mandate, my ass!’” So opens the memorable B-Movie, a track written and recorded by Gil Scott-Heron in 1981 after the election of Ronald Reagan. In the ensuing 12 minutes, over a brooding drum pattern, the poet and jazz musician from Jackson, Tennessee, conducts a droll disembowelment of the new president and his credentials for the job. That first line questions the legitimacy of his right to govern at all, “The Gipper” having amassed the support, as Scott-Heron points out, of just “26 per cent of the registered voters”.

In Seventies and Eighties Britain, Gil Scott-Heron was the radical poster-boy of the student hall of residence. More cerebral than Bob Marley, but with just as much drug kudos and anti-establishment lustre, the rangy sometime novelist and Eng Lit teacher had spent those decades more or less inventing rap, without anyone really calling it that – least of all him. Drawled out in elegant, spoken syncopations, his laconic satires on subjects like Watergate, apartheid and the nuclear industry formed a funky soundtrack to a thousand subsidised nights at Mandela Bars and Karl Marx Cafés.

At the age of 20, with the 1969 poem “Whitey on the Moon”, Scott-Heron alighted on his formula: sparse rhythmic loops, spoken rhymes. Today, from Vermont to Vladivostok, that is the chosen means of self-expression for any musician under 40 – white, black and all shades between. It is quite a legacy. But if it represents a triumph of form, it would be misleading to equate the content of his work with much of the monotonous boasting that clogs up the contemporary airwaves. At his best, Scott-Heron combined an effortless feel for phrasing and elision with a journalist’s appetite for the truth behind the façades of both personal and political life. His impulse, he recalls in this posthumously published memoir, was “to create a recorded chronicle of an era… that reshaped America first and everywhere else later”.

Among those chronicles, primarily of the black experience, were vivid depictions of the alcoholism and drug abuse that were rife in the America of his day. In songs like The Bottle (1974) and Angel Dust (1978), Scott-Heron told unflinching stories of the perils of addiction. But there was a reason they rang so true. As his career reached a plateau in the mid-Eighties, when he was dropped by Arista records, home to Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, he was sliding into dependency himself. Sentenced in 2001 for possession of cocaine, he spent the next 10 years in and out of jail, winding up HIV-positive and broke. He died in May last year, aged 62.

It was the birthday of Martin Luther King on Monday, which is a public holiday in the US. The existence of this annual acknowledgement of the Civil Rights struggle owes much to a campaign waged by Stevie Wonder, who embarked in 1980 on a nationwide tour of America to press for King’s birthday to be celebrated. Today the Hotter Than July tour is best remembered for his ebullient song Happy Birthday, but opening each show on the tour for Wonder was Scott-Heron. The best chapters of The Last Holiday are his account of those nights, culminating in a concert and rally in Washington DC, at the spot where King delivered his “I have a dream” speech in 1963.

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Given the crack, the prison and the penury, it’s a minor miracle that this book exists at all. Towards the end of his life Scott-Heron was befriended by two Englishmen who had come of age during his influential years. The Last Holiday ends with a note from one of them, the publisher Jamie Byng, that goes some way towards explaining its many stylistic and chronological lurches. Scott-Heron began to write it in the early Nineties, but didn’t resume until 2004, encouraged by Byng. The book contains nothing on incarceration or his drug problems; his three children by three mothers receive only cursory mentions; the end of his long musical partnership with composer and arranger Brian Jackson – the bedrock of his entire career – merits a single line. So witty and whimsical when rhymed over music, as prose Scott-Heron’s words often lie heavy on the page.

If The Last Holiday can be frustrating in its lack of candour about aspects of himself, it comes beautifully to life when he is describing others. Stevie Wonder emerges as a man of greater vision than most who have their sight; the moment Wonder announces to a packed arena that John Lennon has been killed is extraordinarily charged; Michael Jackson’s visit to the tour lovingly evokes the magical aura of his youth.

At the Grammys next month, there will be a Lifetime Achievement award for Scott-Heron. Though he would doubtless have regarded such a thing with self-deprecating amusement, the recognition comes in part thanks to his other significant Englishman, Richard Russell. The XL Recordings boss wrote to Scott-Heron when he was locked up on the notorious Rikers Island in New York, and in 2010 coaxed one final – and hugely impressive – record out of him. It is in that album, and the 19 that preceded it through 40 years of consistently original music-making, that the true story of this complex and difficult man can be found.